Monday, June 29, 2015

On the drive to work, I remembered my dream, which I almost never do: I was carrying a baby through this giant Victorian house: part Louisiana plantation house set-up, part Winchester House. There were a lot of steps and someone in the dream made a wisecrack about Escher. I was following this whole family as they ran through the house until we got to a pier. Another wing of the house had been built on the end of the pier but had fallen into the lake and was now submerged. The family shimmied out of their clothes like Europeans at the beach and all jumped in. I set the baby down on the pier and followed and the baby jumped in too. We went through a busted stained glass skylight and swam around the inside of the sunken house. I kept thinking, I better get this baby up to the surface for air, but he or she (don't remember) would swim by giggling up a cloud of bubbles, so we just kept swimming.

Last night, I met up some friends and one of them said he's been having vivid dreams, and another recounted a conversation with other mutual friends, saying the woman always hated it when the man would tell her his dream. I pictured an exaggerated, deflating sigh on her part, practically holding up a sign that said HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Just before that, I was messing around in the practice space and came up with a simple but kinda cool riff and just added some dumb lyrics about dreams to it, just to try it out and now I really like the song, so since you are so far indulging me...

I could have waited, waited a little longerIf my heart, my heart had been a little strongerMy dreams carry me awayMy dreams are stronger than I am

I could have been your man, could've been your man a little longerIf my willpower had been, willpower been a little strongerMy dreams carry me awayMy dreams are stronger than I am

I was going to put the whole Georges Méliès movie mentioned above, but I came across another called "The Devil in a Convent" which sounds like much saucier dream material, so here you go, and again, I'm sorry.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Father John Misty - Fear FunThe War on Drugs - Lost in the DreamGrateful Dead - Workingman's Dead

You know you wanted him to jump off that cliff, not create a singalong on the hillside.

But then his idea of "happiness" is like John Cage's concept of "silence" - a noisy thing constructed out of passively and openly consuming the noise/contentment of others and reframing it as your own.

It made me mad last night, in both viewings. I watched this whole thing so he could create that Coke ad?

But it is an acceptance of how the world works? Joan needs a second name on the marquis to make it hers, so she adds her own. That world's most desirable woman finds herself the most meaningful and fruitful partner. She becomes her own binary star around which she elliptically orbits. Not a boobs analogy, by the way.

Did Meghan get killed by the Manson family? She became so unimportant once that check was slid across the table that I had to consult Wikipedia to see if she was alive. Did she only exist to birth her mother into this world? Is Roger bagging the mom the last triumph of the Greatest Generation? Is this really Benjamin Buttons?

The National - AlligatorSlowdive - SouvlakiFaust - Faust IV

The story goes that Bill Backer (similarly alliterative/descriptive kind of name as Don Draper) from the real McCann-Erickson had the Coke ad epiphany sitting in Shannon airport, watching a family lose it over flight delays until someone went and bought Cokes for everyone. He wrote "I want to buy the world a Coke" on a napkin and brought that back to the agency.

I put a theory out there that Don Draper is Scarlett O'Hara - down to the wearing of drapes and making people not give a damn. I was going to say also: relying on the kindness of strangers, but that was Streetcar. If he'd eaten a turnip at the ashram, I'd have felt validated in having such a theory and would have gone directly to the Internet with it in proud hand.

The race car on the salt flats? He already made a land speed record chasing the collapse of his myth from the tip of the Empire State Building, viewed in that sales meeting, to lotus sitting at the coast.

Did Andy Warhol ever show up in the show at some point? I would have loved to see Peggy at a Factory party.

The Mountain Goats, TallahasseeFucked Up, David Comes to LifeJimmy Cliff, The Harder the Come

What is Don and Betty's other kid's name? He didn't even get scandalized, poor guy.

I was going to say something profound about the importance of dish-washing in Mad Men but realized I was think about the dish-washing scenes in Olive Ketteridge, so never mind.

I still do and will forever think about that time Don came back home late to Connecticut and all Betty had for his dinner was chicken salad and crackers and how good that plate of chicken salad and crackers looked. I want some chicken salad right now.

Who got Lane's office after he died? Because, ew... And now somebody else will get that office without knowing, Remember how "this is home" they were being? Or was that even the same building? And does it matter when the trace of your death is as faint as the trace of your life?

As people are saying Mad Men/ SCDP/advertising/the '60s/'70s is purgatory, are they all dead on arrival, only to be born in how they leave? Are the virtuous pagans in the penthouse tier of hell, gazing over the rim, waiting for a harrowing? Is McCann-Erickson an uprising in Hell? The devil just doing business? A tide in which their trickle of darkness becomes manifest? Is Pete Campbell the Orpheus that successfully got his wife out of the shadows forever? I kinda knew Trudy was going to win out in the end.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Jubilee is Derek Jarman's wet kiss welcoming and also saying a last good bye to England during the economic despair that led to the punk movement. It has a Shakespearean cant to it - much of the dialog involves a wild-eyed seer making a speech to a gathering of dim bulbs until it is time to watch one of them light up and say their part. There is a time-travel plot involving the arrival of Elizabeth I into the ruins of Elizabeth II, but really, it is a cascade of punk apocalypse charm. The recurring theme throughout the film is scavenging among the dead. Car wreck victims, royalty, one poor girl (presumed dead) being trussed on the street by a barbed-wire maypole are stripped of their earrings and jewelry. Everything is ravaged. And over-acted.

If this sounds like too much of a downer, there is a healthy dose of groovy 70's nudity and the introduction of a baby-faced Adam Ant.

I've always known of this film for the Throbbing Gristle soundtrack. Fittingly, the imagery of this 48-minute mood piece consists of layers of washed out film juxtaposed so you have slow-moving figures engaged in some kind of trance ritual mixed with anonymous car-window landscapes and people tapping on typewriters. Like how the noodling soundtrack never commits to a song, the film never commits to a vision and yet together the impression emerges. The world is layed waste not by politics or punks, but by a wearisome existence. All that is left is a ghost. If I'd seen this when I was nineteen, I would have declared it the greatest movie ever made and likely thrown a copy of Naked Lunch at you for disagreeing.

Blue (1993)

Jarman's last film is part conceptual art joke, part intimate poem. The filmmaker was in the final throes of AIDS related illnesses, rendered nearly blind, when he released this film consisting of a single shot of the color blue as a number of actors and musicians muse in an ethereal collage over the various meanings of blue: sadness, the sky, the planet Earth, the wind. The soundtrack is a compelling, stream-of-consciousness sound collage. It's easy to think the image isn't important, but I found myself turning to it as if I was going to miss something. I suspect Jarman felt the same way. It is a final joke on transformation, in that there isn't any.

A common misconception is that the blue in this film is International Klein Blue, the pigment created by avant-garde artist Yves Klein. It is a similar hue, inspired by Klein's color and his "leap into the void" as Jarman faced his own.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Remember Wynn in Pensacola, FL has all the trappings of being a hipster vinyl haven - in a house in an off-the-beaten neighborhood, almost no social media presence - but

is actually the kind of store the true record nerd relishes and those for whom vinyl is a lifestyle enhancer might blanche at. Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling Pac-Man maze of records. *This* shy of being a hoard. The owner, Jackie Seale, was setting out box after box of dollar records in which these were found:

He said Little Feat's WAITING FOR COLUMBUS was not supposed to be in there, but finders keepers. He plans to fill the front yard with vinyl come record store day. I've almost bought those Genya Ravan albums a bunch of times, so I let the price pull the trigger. Lou Reed plays on one of them, I think.

His prices are good to average. This $50 copy of Baton Rouge blues legend Silas Hogan's TROUBLE AT HOME was too rich for my blood, but he does mail order. He has the original Lightnin' Slim ROOSTER BLUES as well, both on Excello.

The true record score:

Maya is way into The Doors and now I am too again. You can make up your own words while stuck in beach traffic.

I had a premonition that the Terry Riley record would be here and found it tucked away in the 60s section. He has things sorta organized by decade. The Howlin' Wolf is on the prestigious United-Superior label and the super score live nightclub Lightnin' Hopkins LP is on Guest Star. I love semi bootleg blues records.

Should this not be enough to get you to P-cola, the Al Fresco food truck court in their quaint downtown is what every food truck scene should be like. Meaning: the food is actually delicious, there are tables and no roar of gas generators.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

I am going to miss Middleton Library when I leave this campus job in May. I've told people for years my favorite perk of working on campus was the library and they all thought I was crazy.

It was the first place I was excited about when I started college in 1987. The same copy of the Susan Sontag Artaud anthology is on the shelf with the same stain from where I spilled my first cappucino on it, nursing my malleable adulthood in the terrible cafe they had on the second floor of the Union.

I still like the sturdy, academic glow of bound journals. I always wondered if anyone ever looks at these or do they sit there like batteries, waiting to be hooked up to the right flashlight.

I love this view from the fourth floor. I wish there was a zip line from here to the tip of whatever that tower is atop the architecture building.

On my way out, I saw one of my former students on his laptop in the fourth floor lobby. I was amazed. Most students only know the library as having computer labs and never even venture past the second floor. Which is okay; it is the way of things.

That said, I made an Intro to Mass Media assignment once where students had to check out a book and submit a photo outside of the library with themselves and the book. Many of them captioned the photo with "Last time I'm ever doing this!"

I checked out an Artaud book like old times, Harry Crews' FLORIDA FRENZY where he called the South "the hookworm and rickets belt" and Denis Johnson's RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN. Hopefully this spate of activity will keep them afloat a little longer.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

This book was particularly good at relating the appeal of Belle & Sebastian, which is not the easiest thing to do. Thanks largely to one line from Jack Black's character in HIGH FIDELITY, B&S are regarded as sad bastard music, when in fact, they are sneaky bastard music. Stuart Murdoch's art lies somewhere mid the line between Morrissey's Vegas-sized dispesia with himself, love and the world and Stephin Merritt's open distaste for it. I think Murdoch likes his little corner of the world, the cadre of misfits who parade through it and correctly views the rest of mankind as dangerous and/or tedious. But the deal with B&S is that their melodrama is an embrace of adolescence rather than a continuance of it.

I never knew the backstory about Murdoch's long period of isolation recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome basically birthing the songs from TIGERMILK fully formed into the world. The first track, "The State I'm In," is one of the greatest things indie rock has done. If TIGERMILK had been his/B&S's only release, it would give creedence to the "everybody's got one good album in them" theory, but truth is, they continued and eveolved and wrote even greater songs (at least up through THE LIFE PURSUIT, anyway).

Granted, the book talks more about TIGERMILK (only at the very end does it really delve into SINISTER at a fine level) and probably should be named for the first records. But if that doesn't really hang you up, this book does a good job watching the incubation and hatching of a little genius band wthout blowing it out of scale. And like every good 33 1/3 book, it made listening to a great record and even more rewarding experience, even if it didn't go through it micron-by-micron.

The book's discussions of C-86 scene in Scotland made me want to listen to that whole delightfully scrappy era of indie pop, particularly Orange Juice, whose "Rip It Up" titles this little handy but not totally Scottish playlist, which, unlike the book, culminates in IF YOU'RE FEELING SINISTER in detail.

To cap it off, all this Scotland-climate preciousness coupled with this dour rainy weather we're having led me to write this twee bossa nova about staying in. Contains a little cussing. Enjoy!

Sunday, March 8, 2015

I did talks and panels at Hammond, La. Regional Arts Center's "Celebrating the Written Word" literary festival over the weekend, which was great. You should go, not just because the people there run a great festival, but because you get to experience charming Hammond. It's a living downtown of funky bars and restaurants and so on. Even the buildings that were not in use (a minority) were full charm assaults. I had no idea, even though I've lived half an hour away for decades.

I might have begged off a panel to go see a movie in the old Ritz theatre.

It reminded me immediately of Keokuk, Ia., the city I was born in but didn't live in. My grandma lived there and when we'd stay there, we'd inverably have to go to the Revall drugs to get a refill on her nitroglycerin. The buildings in Keokuk all had upstairs apartments like those in Hammond do. As a kid, I dreamed of living in one of those apartments. I thought it would be so cool to say I lived above the Rexall, to bound down the stairs to get candy with couch-cushion change.

I double-dog dare you to drink whatever is in this bottle in Rexall's window. Speaking of drinking, all the bars we went to had package liquor setups in them, namely shelves of wine bottles. It's probably how things are where you live, but it's a rare sight here. I like it. Why should one have to endure the harsh flourescent reality of a convenience store or grocery to get your drink on. And since I'm here...

I really wanted to see an adolescent me peer back at me from the apartment over the Mason Lodge. I bet the magic hour light makes cool shadows on the cheap ancient carpet in that living room, even if it puts glare on the TV.